How Venue Booking Service LocalOye Hustled to Generate Revenues Even Before Launch

LocalOye, a commerce platform for the events industry, has launched its new venue booking and discovery service in Mumbai. The service will help you find and book venues for events like Team Outings, Weddings, Corporate Meetings and Parties etc.

LocalOye, a commerce platform for the events industry, has launched its new venue booking and discovery service in Mumbai. The service will help you find and book venues for events like Team Outings, Weddings, Corporate Meetings and Parties etc.

The service is trying to fix various issues associated with discovering and booking venues for events like multiple phone calls, communications gaps, confusing parameters etc. The platform considers various details like pricing, locality, amenities, catering service etc before suggesting venues.

“Currently, venues work on less than 50% occupancy rate, even during peak months. LocalOye helps improve this via relevant leads and efficient inventory management. We are already working with more than 300 venues in Mumbai and a conversion rate of 67% for venue seekers,” said Aditya Rao, Founder and CEO, LocalOye.

LocalOye also soon plans to launch SaaS based B2B tools for venues like inventory and lead management, business analytics dashboard tools and CMS for managing online presence.

LocalOye currently has over 300 venues listed on the site. We loved the concept. Simply because its a big pain to haggle with the venue owners and zero in on a price. If you are into event management, or simply need to book a venue, give LocalOye a spin.

Even before launch, the company had started making money! Here’s how.

The service, which started its life as a mobile app to discover local business, reached from an idea to a live product in 4 weeks, says Rao. The interesting part is that it managed to get its first clients and revenue even before the product was launched.

This is how they did it. The service did not wait for the product to launch to go into sales mode. On Day 0 itself, Rao set up a one page website and ran Google forms and Pdf templates to suggest venues to people who were signing up. A little bit of help from Google AdWords and Social media got them 11 active leads, who were then personally followed up with emails and Skype calls. Out of these the company was able to service 6 leads and convert 2 getting them their first revenue even before product launch.

All this because of what Aditya’s ex-boss from his previous startup drilled into his head “Start selling from day 0”. Remember how Groupon was just a blog before it became a billion dollar company?

A question for LocalOye.com

Most of these venues are managed by old school styled (trust etc) – How does LocalOye plan to get through that?

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Hi Anand, thanks for the feedback and review. Regarding your question about the venue managers being old style, yes that is true. But everyone understands the simple pitch of "We will save you time and get you more money".. so it has been going well for us. We get them money via relevant leads and save time via Inventory Management Systems. The ancillary features coming in the next few weeks should only add to the trust we are building. More details are here > http://localoye.com/blog/pre-launch-sales-revenue-before-launch/

But also the situation is changing and most decent venues these days (though owned by old schoolers) are managed by youngsters who know their .coms and mobile apps :)